Madras High Court Orders Patent Grant To North Face, Says Invisible Marker Technology Was Overlooked

The Madras High Court on 16 October set aside the refusal of a patent application filed by The North Face Apparel Corp. for its invention titled “Systems and Methods for End-to-End Article Management,” holding that the Patent Office had failed to properly assess the inventive step involved in the claimed technology.

Justice K. Kumaresh Babu allowed the company's appeal under Section 117A of the Patents Act, 1970, and directed the Controller of Patents and Designs to grant a patent for the invention, and set aside its order dated 16 April 2025. The Bench held:

“The attempt made by the examiner to refuse the recognition of the patent claimed by the appellant on the ground of alleged mosaicing of the cited documents is not well founded.”

The North Face's invention concerned an integrated process for managing articles such as clothing, apparel, accessories and fabric-based components. The process enabled end-to-end traceability and dynamic detection of manufacturing discrepancies to ensure that finished articles conformed to their intended design parameters.

The Patent Office opposed the appeal, maintaining that it had examined the application as a whole. It argued that the combined teachings of four prior-art documents, D21 to D24, provided sufficient motivation for a person skilled in the art to arrive at the claimed invention.

After examining the impugned order and the Patent Office's counter-affidavit, the Court found that the examiner had dissected the invention and compared its individual features with the cited documents, contrary to the Patent Office's claim that it had assessed the invention as a whole.

It also noted that the Patent Office's own submissions acknowledged differences between the objectives of the cited documents and the invention claimed by The North Face.

D21 concerned the automated production of personalised garments using a scanner to obtain a three-dimensional model of a customer's body shape. The Court observed that the invention before it involved a different process for identifying articles and detecting manufacturing discrepancies.

D22 dealt with optically readable codes, whereas the claimed invention used invisible markers. The Court held that the teachings of D22 could not, in the circumstances, be treated as common general knowledge to disregard the claimed invention.

Although D23 was relevant to end-to-end article management architecture, Justice Babu found that the steps involved in the claimed invention differed from those disclosed in the document. He also observed that D24 could not, by itself, establish that the combination of all four documents disclosed the claimed process.

Further, the Bench held that the cited documents, individually or collectively, did not disclose the claimed invention. It noted that the examiner had overlooked the use of invisible markers identified through a spectrophotometer to track manufacturing and detect discrepancies.

Referring to the statutory requirement of inventive step, it observed that the requirement involves a technical advance over existing knowledge, economic significance, or both. It held that the claimed process satisfied this requirement when assessed against prior-art documents D21 to D24. It found the refusal order “wholly unsustainable”, and set it aside.

Accordingly, the High Court allowed the appeal and directed the Controller of Patents and Designs to grant a patent for the invention.